epicurious: so much goodness

There are many things I like about Epicurious.com, ranging from the delicious recipes to the impressive UI. I’m still working on identifying all the interesting features I think work well, but here are a few.

1. They split their search paradigm into a simple keyword search, advanced search, and browse. All three of these are easy to use and straightforward.

2. The results page is elegant, yet offers a lot of information and tools.

3. Even though they could offer a ton of options to refine with, their left nav only shows one set of sort options, one set of filters, and a “search within results” keyword box. Advanced search is promoted, but not very visibly.

4. The listing display is easy to scan and informative. I like the little icons that communicate different attributes of a recipe such as “healthy”, “quick and easy”, “wine pairing”, etc.

There’s more to like, but this is all for today.

recommendations – buzzilions.com

Example of a “recommendations” implementation above search results on buzzilions.com:

showing different types of results – oracle

The Oracle OTN can be viewed through a Beta tool called “Semantic Web”. While playing with it, I noticed the interesting idea to lay out the results into three different groups/columns:

Messaging that there’s nothing else to refine by – B&N

Barnes & Noble are using Endeca for navigating their online catalog. For most part, their left nav is pretty standard, but they are on to something interesting with showing a special message when you reach the end of all possible refinements. It could use more work, but it’s an interesting idea.

information callout – ny times

NYT is rolling out something called TimesPeople. I haven’t had time to check it out yet, but they are using an interesting callout/promo to bring attention to it.

decent left nav – dawdle

Another example of a nice classic left nav implementation can be found at Dawdle.

A plea for looking good

It may sound obvious, but it gets lost amidst “KPIs”, “needle-movers”, features, functions, etc. — looking good matters (in design).

Thanks 37signals for the reminder:

Aesthetics is a feature in itself. One that I — and most the rest of the human race — is perfectly willing to let trump other functionality.

FaThumb: microsoft research and faceted search on mobile

Microsoft Research is working on faceted search for cell phones.

taptu – mobile/social search

Peter Morville posted some good screenshots of Taptu, a mobile social search app that seems pretty well designed. They even have a whitepaper on this stuff, but I haven’t read it yet.

best bets messaging, bizrate

Bizrate takes you to the best bet subcategory for your keyword search. I searched for “bike helmet” and they took me to the Bicycle Equipment subcategory. However, in case I want to expand my search or search elsewhere, they list other places on their site that have results for “bike helmet”. I like their wording and placement.

We do something similar, but we don’t do a very great job with the messaging right now. This is something we should work on improving: